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Jun 19, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Lesley Hart Gunn |Emily Verona |Joanne Rixon
The jacket copy for A Magical Girl Retires describes it as a “whimsical and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga.” For once, a book’s marketing blurb provides a useful lens on the text itself: A Magical Girl Retires certainly has whimsy and imagination, but what stands out most is the sheer comic book of it all. As well as the evocative cover, comics artist Kim Sanho provides dynamic and thoughtfully composed illustrations for the beginning of each chapter.
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Jun 11, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Danilo Heitor |Tajudeen Muadh |Jess Hyslop
[In this interview, Will Shaw speaks to Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, the World Fantasy Award-winning SF critic and translator, about his latest project, The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Collection of Bengali Science Fiction (MIT Press 2024), a part of MIT Press' Radium Age series.
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May 15, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Louis Hall |Elizabeth McClellan |J. Deery Wray
Twentieth-century science fiction begins in Bengal. This is the argument tacitly put forward by MIT Press’s Radium Age series of science fiction reprints, whose first entry, the anthology Voices from the Radium Age, opened with the 1905 story “Sultana’s Dream” by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Given this opening move, it feels a little odd that it took until its fourteenth outing for the series to produce a book comprised entirely of Bengali science fiction. Both Niall Harrison and Michael D.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Caroline Hung |Arthur Manners |Emma Murray
What did we want from a Kelly Link novel? Speaking purely for myself, the answer was, “I didn’t.” For more than two decades Link has produced world-class short fiction, some of it on the longer side, but all of it taking perfect advantage of the form—its fluidity, its permission to linger on well-chosen images, its ability to do without strict explanations.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | William Shaw |Cecilia Caballero |Jay Gomez |Kathy Chao
The dedication of Green Fuse Burning reads “For all those in the swamplands.” This line, like most of this debut novella from acclaimed poet Tiffany Morris, has multiple meanings. The book is literally for those in the swamplands, in that its protagonist, artist Rita Francis, is a member of the Mi’kmaq people indigenous to North America’s Northeastern Woodlands, an area including a lot of wetlands. But it’s also for those who inhabit more metaphorical swamplands.
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Cecilia Caballero |Kathy Chao |Jay Gomez |William Shaw
When I saw the Acapulco port for The first time I saw stone and Bone in ocean They were there And they are still Here, rising in My throat A dark matter That stays A dark matter That calls my Name, a llanto I heard this time I wanted to run From the terror On the projector From the classroom I wanted to run, go, NOW Past the building Named after a Eugenicist where I Taught students about Black people in Latin America, where my Ancestors were anchored On a screen I wanted to run Far away from...
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Feb 19, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Jay Gomez |Kathy Chao |Cecilia Caballero |William Shaw
Theory #2: Experiography is not cinema. It is not writing; it is not poetry or fiction. Experiography is not art. Experiography is not history. Roger Williams’ boy slave wears the little red cloth around his neck,standing in a horde of children and mothers in June 1637, in 2068,in the Brown University Experiography Lab. The fathers were drowned yesterday. Ask Stoughton and he’ll tell you it was the quickestway to feed them to the fishes. Theory #6: The experiographer is an academic.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |William Shaw
Violently Dancing Portraits by Arvo Villars, recently published by selva oscura press, is a gorgeously intertextual, experimental Caribbean-American lyric fantasia in two parts. Each section, titled only by number, is carefully constructed to fit together as closely as implied by the table of contents—which is carefully formatted as a dense block of text, marking the separation of the two parts only by putting the numbers “one” and “two” in bold.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Jenny Hamilton |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |William Shaw
Blessings on Ayize Jama-Everett and his publisher, Small Beer Press, for giving readers the simple gift of a “Previously On” at the start of Heroes of an Unknown World, the long-awaited final book in Jama-Everett’s Liminal People series.
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Jan 31, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Eve Morton |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |William Shaw
When a poetry collection opens with an epigraph from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” and a quote from Genesis about giants, I know I’m in for a good time. And that’s what I could call Seren of the Wildwood by Marly Youmans, published in 2023 by Wiseblood Books: a roaring good time.
